Tipping Points

Eugene Linden, a long-time correspondent for Time magazine, has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for more than 20 years. His award-winning articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. Here, he talks about global warming and other disasters.

It's 68 degrees today in Washington, while the average high has historically been 46 degrees. Explain to me why today isn't a fluke.

Well, it could well be a fluke. Climate change and global warming don't mean it gets warm every day everywhere from this point on. You can't point to one event and say, that's because of climate change. What you can say is that as the planet warms, these things become more likely. All sorts of changes begin to come about. You get warm winters. Yet things are warming up. The signs are everywhere. I don't think anyone disputes that. Call it for shorthand, “global warming.” But the danger for us in the near-term is more likely “climate chaos.” When climate changes states rapidly and abruptly, it tends to flicker back and forth. It can get warm, it can get cool, and you can get droughts. You can get all kinds of weather extremes as climate tries to find a new equilibrium. That's the real deal, because that could ruin the entire world economy.

The consensus is that it is getting warmer. But there seems to be a controversy, fueled by big public-relations campaigns, about whether or not human activity is causing it.

I've watched this pretty closely, and in fact, I have a chapter in the book where I talk about the ludicrous disconnect between the scientific consensus -- that the climate is warming and we're the cause of the recent warming -- and the public's apathy toward the issue.

You argue that because we've never experienced a shift like this before, there's no possible way the public can recognize a shift like this.

I use the analogy of tourists standing on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, watching the tsunami come in, not knowing to run for their lives because they've never seen anything like that before. Well, we -- those of us living today, those of us going back 150 years -- have never seen anything like this before. If you take carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a proxy for temperature change, pre-industrial levels were 270 parts per million. We're now at 380 parts per million. We are almost assuredly going to get to 500 parts per million in the atmosphere. There haven't been concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere like that since Homo sapiens evolved. We're creating a different climate than the climate under which we evolved. That, to me, is kind of frightening. It's unknown how we'll adapt to it.

How are we going to adapt to this? Do underdeveloped communities with more fundamental skills have a better chance at survival?

It would be morally nice to say yes, but I'm not so sure it's true. They're the ones who might get screwed by drought in the tropical parts of the world. You can see, for instance, radical reductions of rainfall in Mexico. You already had a million people leaving the land every year because of desertification in the 1990s, and you can have a lot more and a lot worse than that. We are more resilient than past civilizations. El Niños killed tens of millions of people in the 19th century, basically through the combination of British arrogance, dunderheadness, and catastrophic weather. In the 20th century, we haven't seen that kind of destruction from El Niños, even though they've been almost as powerful as some of those in the 19th century.

We can adapt and spread risk. We're more resilient. The modern market economy is a device for spreading risk. The response to the tsunami is a good example. The whole world pitched in to try and help out. But imagine events like Katrina and Rita all of a sudden coming thick and fast. You can respond to them if they're intermittent and isolated, but if they're ubiquitous and happening at an ever-increasing pace, it can overwhelm a society. That's the risk for us.

We're more resilient, but we're also more leveraged. We've got six billion people living on an exquisitely balanced food system. Knock it around a little bit, and you can have real problems. You've got 90-plus food-importing nations and only a few food/grain-exporting nations, and we're the largest of the lot. Drought in the heartland of America would have an enormous effect not just on us, but also on the rest of the world.

The United States is trying to promote democratic civilization in the Middle East, but at the same time, this climate shift is happening that has the potential to erode civilization. What parallels can you draw between our role today and the Viking conquests that came to an end when the climate changed?

Had the Norse simply observed what the Inuit were doing, they would have gotten through the winters fine when the Little Ice Age hit -- which is the event we're talking about that did in the Norse colonies in Greenland. A type of cultural ethnocentrism is a dangerous thing. We've got blinders on. The analogy to the Middle East that I would draw is that we stigmatize the messianic faith of the fundamentalists, asking how can these people blindly live in this medieval mindset and not recognize the 20h century? But I would say that the kind of religious faith of the technological positivists -- that technology and markets are going to save us -- is the equivalent of that faith. One of the reasons we aren't doing much about climate change is this blind faith, a fundamentalist faith that markets and technology will solve everything. Even though nobody knows quite how it's going to happen, we assume it will because it's always happened in the past.

In the Middle East, you have a case where, in entering Iraq, we went in without anybody else, despite this meager coalition of the willing. Here's a case where most of the world desperately wants to do something and we're saying no. We're the holdout. And the fact of the matter is the United States has to lead on this. We're a quarter of the world's emissions. China and India are certainly not going to do anything unless we do something, so we have to take the lead on this.

I would vastly prefer that Bush's policy on climate change was the same as his policy on Iraq. They went into Iraq with false information. With climate change, we have the most credible sources in the world, and all of the sudden he has this pacifist streak where he says, we can't attack this issue until we know more. Well, the world would probably be a better place today if he'd had that attitude before going into Iraq.

So you're advocating a preemptive war on climate change?

It's not preemptive since we've already been invaded.

Regardless of how anybody feels about this administration, we can't wait for another administration to take action. You don't want to wait three years to lose another three years. It's been 18 years since climate change really got on the national agenda. Had we started back then, we would be in much better shape right now. Had we had a gas tax 15 years ago when it was first proposed, we probably wouldn't have as much of an energy problem as we do today. Had we began during 1979, during the Carter administration, when a blue-ribbon panel predicted that weather would be changing by the end of the century if we didn't take action -- they were right on the money -- had we started back then we'd be in much better shape. If we start today, we've got to start today, and if we do so we'll be in much better shape than if we start three years from now.

Is the Kyoto Treaty enough?

No. There's no way the Kyoto Treaty's enough. What it is is a start. You make it tougher. The amount of action just to stabilize at this 500 parts per million -- much less to get back to where we ought to be -- the kinds of things you need have been spelled out: massive investments in wind power and other alternative energy and conservation. They're staggering, but they're doable. Nobody's going to do them unless there is some impetus. The treaty could help.

I proposed an alternative to Kyoto a few years back. Like Kyoto, just divide the world into three parts, set a differential target, and let them meet it any way they want to. Let's get a target and get a mechanism to get going on this because we can accomplish a lot. We can slow this trend down.

My fear is that I wrote this book thinking about the future, and it looks like I'm talking about the present.

Bush came out and surprised a lot of people by talking about alternative energy. Do you think he's serious?

I'd be delighted if the Bush administration picked up this issue and decided it was serious about it. He never mentioned climate change in that speech, which gives one pause. At the same time, he's talking about an initiative for alternative energies and ending our addiction to oil, but he's cutting the budget for the various agencies that would be responsible for taking the lead, in the very areas where we'd have to pursue it. So you'd have to say that if he's serious, somehow his staff didn't get the memo.

In a recent op-ed in The Independent, James Lovelock said that we're “past the point of no return” for climate change. Do you agree with this?

Climate's changing. You can get past a point where you get these runaway effects. We don't know what the tipping points are. Anybody who asserts that it we stop at 450 and get two degrees or something like that, I think they're blowing smoke. These are informed guesses. Half the time they're based on models that don't even apply to the way climate really changes.

The only way we'll know the tipping point at this point is once we've passed it. That to me is a call to action. Lovelock is an amazingly creative and smart scientist, but he's making an informed guess like everybody else on this. A certain degree of warming has occurred. To the degree that it's our fault, it's locked in.

I've written a lot about animal intelligence over the years, and in the past the thing we'd like to think distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is our ability to anticipate problems and head them off. Fruit flies just keep going, and when they hit the wall, millions die and they crash. I'd like to think that we're better than fruit flies.

Jared Irmas is a Prospect intern and a fellow at Roosevelt Institution, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based, student-run think tank.